Likelihood to Recommend Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:
Network mesh Service DNS Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well) Utility for blue-green deployments Service health checking Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.
Read full review TeamCity is very quick and straightforward to get up and running. A new server and a handful of agents could be brought online in easily under an hour. The professional tier is completely free, full-featured, and offers a huge amount of growth potential. TeamCity does exceptionally well in a small-scale business or enterprise setting.
Read full review Pros Key-Value database management. Service discovery. Centralized configuration database with native high availability. Read full review TeamCity provides a great integration with git, especially Bitbucket. When a new code release (build) fails TeamCity has a great tool for investigation and troubleshooting. TeamCity provides a user-friendly interface. While some technical knowledge is required to use TeamCity, the design helps simply things. Read full review Cons The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul Read full review The customization is still fairly complex and is best managed by a dev support team. There is great flexibility, but with flexibility comes responsibility. It isn't always obvious to a developer how to make simple customizations. Sometimes the process for dealing with errors in the process isn't obvious. Some paths to rerunning steps redo dependencies unnecessarily while other paths that don't are less obvious. Read full review Usability Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
Read full review Performance TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.
Read full review Support Rating I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.
Read full review TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool. Visual Studio Team Services (
VSTS ) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud.
VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only. TeamCity's interface is easier to use than
VSTS , and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But
VSTS 's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.
Eric Huggins Cloud Services Practice Manager and Principal Architect
Read full review Return on Investment It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before. For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean. Read full review TeamCity has greatly improved team efficiency by streamlining our production and pre-production pipelines. We moved to TeamCity after seeing other teams have more success with it than we had with other tools. TeamCity has helped the reliability of our product by easily allowing us to integrate unit testing, as well as full integration testing. This was not possible with other tools given our corporate firewall. TeamCity's ability to include Docker containers in the pipeline steps has been crucial in improving our efficiency and reliability. Read full review ScreenShots